Numerous attempts are known to provide buildings and industrial sites with a reliable and easy to use control network for appliances such as switching loads in dependence of actual sensor values such as time, temperature, and intrusion detector. Whereas the construction of modems or transceiver for the various possible transmission media, for example, wireless transmission using infrared or radio frequency electromagnetic waves, twisted pair of cables, coaxial cables, and AC power lines and of secure and robust network protocols made significant progress during the last decade, the art still lacks a control network architecture which at least in principle can be installed, configured, and used by everyone. The prior art though providing some assisting tools to a skilled network administrator widely fails in this respect.
The U.S. Pat. No. 4,864,492 provides a system and method for applying a knowledge based expert system to the creation of configuration parameters individualized to the workstations of complex networks. The knowledge is used to provide a menu and control the selections available to the network administrator. Further references of the prior art relate to methods of graphical representation of the networks topology. U.S. Pat. No. 4,942,540 for example describes a way to create and select a communication path between a user's terminal and a destination terminal by selecting the communication parameters from a scrollable menu. Graphical representation of the terminals and path are depicted in response to different menu selections. The European patent application EP-A-0 490 624 provides a system and method of operation by which a network administrator can graphically depict a network by defining a multiplicity of nodes with respective hardware and operating systems characteristics, and can then define the protocols of the communication paths between the nodes, and based upon such network of nodes and communication paths constraints can thereafter generate configuration parameters for the various operating systems of the nodes, which typically are workstations or PCs. Obviously this approach to the problem of network configuration is not meant for other users than professional network administrators.
It is therefore an object of the invention to provide an intuitively useable method of network configuration, in particular for building control and automation.
The invention assumes the existence of a network for controlling a for example building, said network comprising single nodes. Each node carries at least one modem or transceiver for transmitting data over a transmission medium. Each node further comprises a read/write (r/w) memory for storing microcode and a microprocessor for executing the microcode stored in the memory. Within the network, each node has a node ID. The node ID allows to identify from reading a specific part of the transmitted data, e.g. a header section, the sending and/or receiving node. Generally, each node carries at least one sensor element or one actuator element . While basically the networks lying within the scope of the invention based on so-called peer-to-peer networking, further the existence of a special node with a user interface is assumed. This special node is designed to receive the input of a user or display and store information about the network and its nodes. As "peers" the nodes can after the network configuration communicate directly with each other without relying on the central node.
Networks of the above described type are known. An early example is published by N. McArthur et al. in "The intelligent plug", Wireless World, Dec. 1979, pp. 46-51. Another more recent network is described in the European patent application EP-A-0 393 117.